Online Affiliate Marketing Business - Concentration vs. Diversification

An online affiliate marketing business is one of the best ways to start earning an income on the internet. In addition to the low startup costs this particular business model allows online entrepreneurs to focus exclusively on learning how to generate traffic. Another reason affiliate marketing is often considered the best business to start online is because most products you promote are already in demand.
With a vast selection of proven products to sell and having to focus only on traffic generation this allows the affiliate marketer the opportunity to promote many products simultaneously.
Now this leads us to the question: When you are marketing on the internet should you be promoting more than one product at a time? Are you diluting the marketing effectiveness you may otherwise experience if your efforts were focused on just one product?
Let's examine the pros and cons of focusing all your marketing efforts on just one product.
The Pros
By concentrating your promotional efforts on just one product you can increase the intensity of your marketing blitz. It also allows you additional time to more closely watch and evaluate your advertising results so that necessary adjustments can be made. This would result in being able to more closely maximize the sales potential of the product
The Cons
By placing 'all your eggs in one basket' you risk losing all your income if and/or when the product fails to generate the needed demand for you to profit.
Too many things could go wrong that are out of your control such as a product recall, or discontinuation. Also a competitive product could be introduced that could quickly diminish demand for the existing product you are currently marketing on the internet.
The Conclusion
By diversifying you can minimize the negative impact you may experience when one product drops off in popularity. You (hopefully) still have other products experiencing strong demand/sales to pick up the slack.
On the other hand you may not be able to reap the full benefits of a hot product since your promotional efforts aren't as intense as they may be if you focused solely on that particular product.
In the end diversification is probably more prudent due to the volatility and fickleness of consumer demand as it relates to any particular product. The inability to accurately predict market trends will always be a constant. That being said, in the long run, diversification would seem to be the better business decision in most cases. There is however no clear cut answer in this case.
One of the most compelling benefits of an online affiliate marketing business is that it allows for you to focus primarily on traffic generation. This gives most online entrepreneurs the opportunity to quickly sharpen their promotional skills since no time will be spent in the creation and shipping of products they are marketing on the internet. Now as a result the option of promoting many products simultaneously exists. When you also consider the low startup costs it is no wonder why many regard affiliate marketing as the best business to start online. The question as to whether promoting multiple products will negatively impact marketing efforts due to a lack of focus is a legitimate one. The final decision on that however should ultimately be made on an individual basis according to the motivational skills, promotional talents and experience of each marketer.